THE IMPACT OF INTEGRATING ETHICS ACROSS THE CURRICULUM ON STUDENTS
Salame Amr, Ph.D.[1]
Abstract
Much of the engineering technology curriculum lends itself to an ethics and technology-based delivery approach. This approach is enhanced by many ethical case studies presented to students and discussed. Lecture notes, supplemented by other media, promote synthesis and evaluation in the classroom.
Students have a duty to maintain integrity in their professional work, particularly in the application of their skills to problems where private interests may inappropriately affect the development or application of technical knowledge. They should present their result and interpretations honestly and objectively, avoid untrue, deceptive, or undocumented statements, and disclose any financial or other interests that may affect their professional statements. They should also collect only the data needed for the purpose of their inquiry, inform each potential respondent about the general nature and sponsorship of the inquiry and the intended uses of the data. They should ensure that the means are adequate to protect confidentiality to the extent pledged or intended, that processing and use of data conform to the pledges made, that appropriate care is taken with directly identifying information.
Leadership skills are developed in the context of work in the institutions of technical and ethical education. Their effectiveness plays a major role in developing leadership recognition programs through training for professional growth aspects of team-building. Assessment of the developed leadership skills and the application of quantitative skills through the task of project management provide a signal for achievement.
An ethics across a technical course format for junior/senior level technology-based delivery is reviewed, and demonstrated. An approach for integrating these formats with lecture media and practice will be presented. Interaction among students in a group project enhances their ethical skills and leadership abilities as they work through various stages. Based on experiences, integrating ethics across the curriculum organize an educational learning infrastructure for ethics that has influenced the leadership development and learning competency.
Introduction
The responsibility of an accredited program in an institution aims to inspire, enhance and sustain teaching research and service related to ethics across the curriculum. The major thrust of this work is to enhance the awareness of ethical issues. Facilitating the awareness of ethical dilemmas in the university community is vital. This can be accomplished through a variety of approaches to foundational and professional ethical dilemmas. This paper will promote the study of ethics throughout the curriculum. Additionally, students' experiences in the study of ethics will be advanced through the efforts from the instructor. Faculty is also afforded opportunities for ethical study and subsequent course improvement. The students will benefit through lectures, workshops, publications and informal discussions. In pursuing its mission, the institution respects the autonomy of the various ethics programs as well as other departmental efforts. It aims to impact the undergraduate, graduate and professional levels of education by sponsoring lectures to stimulate conversations about ethics, providing developmental opportunities for the faculty to become more informed about descriptive and normative ethics, offering a supportive environment in which faculty can explore the ethical issues relative to the classes, laboratories and other settings in which they teach and develop curricular materials that focus on these issues; and, building and sustaining a moral community of discourse among the faculty and fostering a university-wide commitment to the ethical mission of university in faculty research and teaching.
Providing the essential ethics and values course reorganize five goals that could be integrated into designing this track:
1. The discussion of ethics is important and timely. Well-educated students should know the seminal works in ethics and understand the various approaches to moral dilemmas--what could be called ethical literacy?
2. Interdisciplinarity is integral to student understanding. A new perspective on an ethical issue often unfolds with each discipline; sometimes these perspectives conflict. The disciplines used are philosophy, literature, religion and history. Philosophy helps us discern the complexities involved in moral ideas; religion reminds us that each ethical dilemma has inherent moral and value implications and conflicts; literature brings the dilemma to life with characters moving through right and wrong decisions and living with the consequences of their choices; history can help us compare the values of a different time and culture with our own. It can make students aware that an unquestionable assumption today was seen quite differently at another time.
3. The inclusion of a strong writing component, thinking and articulating an issue becomes clearer as students format ideas in written form.
4. Self-confrontation and classroom discussion are encouraged. Students are introspective and may share their thoughts and scholarship with others. They also learn from the reflections of others.
5. Critical thinking is necessary as students understand the perspectives of scholars and writers, for such understanding will shape the analysis of and recommended responses to ethical dilemmas.
Student Outcomes:
1. Recognize ethical issues.
2. Develop critical thinking and self-confrontation skills.
3. Cultivate tolerance toward disagreement and the inevitable ambiguities in dealing with ethical problems.
4. Teaching Critical Thinking regarding ethical case studies.
Teaching ethics to students is the major theme for this researcher. Mentors were allocated in the implementation of ethics into the curriculum. The above goals include a greater understanding of works of enduring value in ethics and humanities, fostering of thinking and self-confrontation skills, and integrating the subject of ethics into undergraduate programs curricula. Challenging the students to understand basic principles of ethics, to think and write clearly about their views confront inconsistencies in their own ethics systems.
It is important to provide a complete education to students, particularly the humanities. Teaching ethics can not only expand sensitivity of students to moral concerns, but it can also help them examine the nature of their ethical assumptions, understand inconsistencies in their value framework, encourage them to more carefully examine appropriate facts, develop decision making strategies for resolving moral dilemmas, and realize that moral values are not merely privately held subjective opinions. Without an intellectual introduction to ethics, students may see the discussion of moral choices.
Professional works include discussions on specific professional codes of ethics; and issues such as confidentiality, lying, informed consent and privacy. Social issues include works in human rights, abortion, homosexuality, the environment, hunger, welfare, euthanasia, legalization of drugs and overpopulation.
The purpose of this work is to promote the advancement and dissemination of the study and practice of ethics. The institution has made a long-term commitment to the study of ethics that will be facilitated the commitment by coordinating efforts in promoting and disseminating activities in ethics.
Seminars on a variety of issues in ethics will work with students for a better understanding of the complications in today's world. Topics for seminars include "Business Ethics," "Environmental Ethics," "Religious Diversity," "Religion and Views of Nature." Several scholars or specialists were invited to speak on the topic during the seminar.
Case Studies:
Technical descriptive courses are where students most directly come face to face with real engineering problems and the professional side of engineering. As others may have suggested before, this is therefore an ideal time to explore some of the ethical issues raised by professionals at work.
Videos can be very useful to show case studies, which may require elaborate setup. Also a video of a working model is often very useful in simplifying a complicated case. The instructor may use the class web-site so that students can make notes on them. A collection of video-tapes can be useful in the integrated courses. There should be an arrangement for the students to make comments and give suggestions on the layout of the class. Access to the digital library on-campus is made available to the students from the class web page.
Educational System Design
To enhance the effectiveness of the educational delivery systems, the relationship between design process structure and learning outcome is studied. This paper suggests that comparing the degree of student interaction with desired outcome skills will facilitate an understanding of the strategic options available to choose from. Using a suitable educational system design, the relationship of the choice of educational delivery approach on learning outcomes gets demonstrated. These approaches represent the types of interaction processes, going from highly standardized processes of interaction to highly interactive. The educational delivery approaches may represent a stage-wise progression of skills, ranging from basic knowledge involving realistic recall to research skills at the top.
Viewed from the educational delivery approach, this system design constructs a form of process environment. These delivery approaches are characterizing a mode of occupying a particular region as determined by the type of communication media chosen and the desired interaction outcome achieved. A trade-off between learning opportunity and production efficiency occurs. The greater the degree of student/teacher interaction, the greater the opportunity for learning and the richer the quality of the learning experience. The less the degree of student/teacher interaction is the weaker the opportunity for production efficiency and consistency in delivery. Other factors, which play a role in influencing the nature of the interaction, include media richness and collective case study presence. Media richness refers to a medium’s capability to convey certain types of information, including immediate feedback, multiple cues, language variety, and personal focus.
As individuals progress from one skills level to the next, qualitative changes occur in the nature of the learning tasks involved. Problem solving becomes more sophisticated, conceptualization more abstract, and the student assumes progressively more responsibility for the learning process. Educational psychologists have long recognized the usefulness of classifying learning outcomes as an aid to curriculum design and standard choice [Bloom, 1]; [Gagne, 6].
The value of the educational system design is that it forces educators to think of both student/teacher interaction as well as educational objectives when choosing a particular learning environment. The interaction will determine the communication media, which in turn, will influence the type of process technologies will need to adopt. Each region represents an environment with a unique combination of learning outcome and corresponding process structure to support it. Learning environments represent good fits between process structure and educational objectives. These are followed by vocational training schools, which have historically succeeded in teaching technical and vocational skills using correspondence formats.
Typically, institutions which lose sight of their distinctive competence will lose their comparative advantage; inadvertently migrate to positions which are untenable they will neglect the key variables that ensured their success. Adopting new technologies, institutions need to keep both dimensions of the educational system design in mind to better understand the potential consequences of their choice. The new strategies essentially replicate the current process focus thereby reinforcing what they already do well. They require a shift in positioning with new competitive priorities and a refocusing of their organizational capabilities.
Conclusion
Obtaining a quality education has been extremely difficult. The constraints and inflexible demands of a traditional university program and difficulty in accessing resources have made the quest for additional professional skills time consuming. Several case study-based formats for integrating ethics are reviewed. Integrating ethics across the curriculum has a positive impact on students.
References
1. Bloom, Benjamin S. (1956), Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Classification of Educational Goals, David McKay Co, New York
2. Brown, J.S. and Dugout, P. (1996), Universities in the Digital Age, Change, pp. 11-19.
3. Collis, B. (1996), Tele-learning in a Digital World: The Future of Distance Learning, International Thompson Computer Press, London, UK
4. Daft, R.L. and Lengel, R.H. (1986), Organizational Information Requirements, Media Richness and Structural Design, Management Science, 32(5), pp. 554-571
5. Daniel, J.S. (1997), Why Universities Need Technology Strategies, Change, July/August, pp. 11-17
6. Gagne, R.M., Briggs, L.J. and Wager, W.W. (1992), Principles of Instructional Design, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Fort Worth, Texas
7. Green, K.C. (1996), The Coming Ubiquity of Information Technology, Change, 28(2), pp. 24-31.
8. Rice, R.E. (1992), Task Analyzability, Use of New Media, and Effectiveness: A Multisite Exploration of Media Richness, Organization Science, 3(4), pp. 475-500.
9. Short, J., Williams, E. and Christie, B. (1976), The Social Psychology of Telecommunications, London, John Wiley & Sons, United Kindom
10. Shostack, G. Lynn (1987), Service Positioning through Structural Change, Journal of Marketing, 51(January), pp. 34-43.
11. Steinfield, C.W. (1986), Computer-mediated Communication in an Organizational Setting: Explaining Task-related and Socioemotional Uses in M. McLaughlin (Ed.), Communication Yearbook, Newbury Park, CA: Sage, pp. 777-804.
12. Treuer, P. and Belote, L. (1997), Current and Emerging Applications of Technology to Promote Student Involvement and Learning in J. H. Schuh and E.J. Whitt (Eds.), New Directions for Student Services, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, pp. 17-30.
13. Wemmerlov, Urban (1990), A Taxonomy for Service Process and Its Implications for System Design, International Journal of Service Industry Management, 1(3), p. 29.
Salame Amr, Ph.D.
Virginia State University
1 Hayden Drive, Box 9212,
Petersburg, VA 23834
Tel: (804)524-5431
E-mail:
From 2002 to present, Department of Engineering, Engineering Technology, Industrial Education and Technology, Virginia State University, Petersburg, Virginia, Assistant Professor
1) Taught several courses at undergraduate levels: Modern Control Systems, Digital Logic Design, Advanced Circuit Analysis, and Advanced Electronics, Digital circuits Design, Communication Systems, Engineering Problem Solving, and B.Sc. Projects.
2) Supervised undergraduate students and established IEEE / Tau Alpha Pi Student chapters.
From 2001 to 2002, Department of Engineering Technology, New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, Assistant Professor
1) Taught courses at undergraduate levels: Electrical and Electronic Circuit Analysis.
2) Submitted research proposals and researched the relevant material.
3) Designed digital filter circuits for low noise integrated circuits.
From 2000 to 2001, Texas Instruments Incorporated, Dallas, Texas, Senior System Engineer
1) Worked with a team of more than ten (10) engineers and technicians.
2) Completed and verified a mathematical model of improved chip designs.
3) Tested modems and communication systems.
4) Attended numerous ASEE, and IEEE conferences.